God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything - 1

[Guest guest]

This week Slate is publishing three excerpts from Christopher

Hitchens' new book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons

Everything.

 

Religion Poison Everything - 1

 

There are four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it

wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because

of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of

servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result

and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is

ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.

 

I do not think it is arrogant of me to claim that I had already

discovered these four objections (as well as noticed the more vulgar

and obvious fact that religion is used by those in temporal charge

to invest themselves with authority) before my boyish voice had

broken. I am morally certain that millions of other people came to

very similar conclusions in very much the same way, and I have since

met such people in hundreds of places, and in dozens of different

countries. Many of them never believed, and many of them abandoned

faith after a difficult struggle. Some of them had blinding moments

of un-conviction that were every bit as instantaneous, though

perhaps less epileptic and apocalyptic (and later more rationally

and more morally justified) than Saul of Tarsus on the Damascene

road. And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our

belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not

rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary

rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that

contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many

things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the

pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions

dogmatically: the disagreement between Professor Stephen Jay Gould

and Professor Richard Dawkins, concerning " punctuated evolution " and

the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as

quite deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and

not by mutual excommunication. (My own annoyance at Professor

Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, for their cringe-making proposal that

atheists should conceitedly nominate themselves to be

called " brights, " is a part of a continuous argument.) We are not

immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and

art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are

better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and

Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of

the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and—

since there is no other metaphor—also the soul. We do not believe in

heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that without these

blandishments and threats we commit more crimes of greed or violence

than the faithful. (In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry could

ever be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way.) We are

reconciled to living only once, except through our children, for

whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way, and

room. We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people

accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might

behave better toward each other and not worse. We believe with

certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we

know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has

caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better

than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways

that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an

eyebrow.

 

Most important of all, perhaps, we infidels do not need any

machinery of reinforcement. We are those who Blaise Pascal took into

account when he wrote to the one who says, " I am so made that I

cannot believe. "

 

There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or

on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to

grovel and wallow in our unworthiness. We atheists do not require

any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine.

Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the

worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form

of one of man's most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no

spot on earth is or could be " holier " than another: to the

ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of

killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine

or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side

of the library or the gallery to another, or to lunch with an

agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty. Some of these

excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery will

obviously, if they are serious, bring us into contact with belief

and believers, from the great devotional painters and composers to

the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman. These

mighty scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish

things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or

the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone

the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of

them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion

spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time

ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous

humanism, as did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor

hanged by the Nazis for his refusal to collude with them. We shall

have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is

why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of

yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward

off the terrible emptiness.

 

While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way—one

might cite Pascal—and some of it is dreary and absurd—here one

cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis—both styles have something in

common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear.

How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible! The Aztecs had to

tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the

sun would rise. Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more

times than that, perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be

concealed—not too effectively at that—in order to pretend that one

is the personal object of a divine plan? How much self-respect must

be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an

awareness of one's own sin? How many needless assumptions must be

made, and how much contortion is required, to receive every new

insight of science and manipulate it so as to " fit " with the

revealed words of ancient man-made deities? How many saints and

miracles and councils and conclaves are required in order first to

be able to establish a dogma and then—after infinite pain and loss

and absurdity and cruelty—to be forced to rescind one of those

dogmas? God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was

the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the

profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and

among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the

development of civilization.

 

The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the

most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it

cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually

said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the " meaning " of

later discoveries and developments which were, when they began,

either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them. And yet—

the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know

everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created

and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what " he "

demands of us—from our diet to our observances to our sexual

morality. In other words, in a vast and complicated discussion where

we know more and more about less and less, yet can still hope for

some enlightenment as we proceed, one faction—itself composed of

mutually warring factions—has the sheer arrogance to tell us that we

already have all the essential information we need. Such stupidity,

combined with such pride, should be enough on its own to

exclude " belief " from the debate. The person who is certain, and who

claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy

of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and,

like all farewells, should not be protracted.

 

The argument with faith is the foundation and origin of all

arguments, because it is the beginning—but not the end—of all

arguments about philosophy, science, history, and human nature. It

is also the beginning—but by no means the end—of all disputes about

the good life and the just city. Religious faith is, precisely

because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never

die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of

the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other. For this reason, I

would not prohibit it even if I thought I could. Very generous of

me, you may say. But will the religious grant me the same

indulgence? I ask because there is a real and serious difference

between me and my religious friends, and the real and serious

friends are sufficiently honest to admit it. I would be quite

content to go to their children's bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their

Gothic cathedrals, to " respect " their belief that the Koran was

dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant,

or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations. And

as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the

polite reciprocal condition—which is that they in turn leave me

alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing. As I

write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in

their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the

destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have

touched upon. Religion poisons everything.

 

Religion Poison Everything - 1

http://www.slate.com/id/2165033?nav=tap3